6 Inch Move Review – Music Magpie

I am well aware that all the excitement at the moment is regarding the shipping of the Dropzone Commander pre-orders. Sadly due to family finances I had to hold off on placing my order longer than I’d have liked, by the time I could do it July 9th was here. I placed my order on that day hoping to be on the right side of the cut-off. Sadly, I’ve not received a shipping confirmation so looks like I missed out on the first batch of orders. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement, I’m not blaming Hawk for this (it’s my wife’s fault for getting a new car 😛 ) but missing out on something I’ve waited so long for is, I think, understandably depressing.

Still, Carabus can’t play until I get my stuff as I’ve got his rulebook and no-one else around us has any models to play with either *cackles evilly*.

However, all that is really a pre-amble to today’s post. As you may know from other posts I’ve written I’m a big fan of the Large and Mega army deals. The only problem for me was actually being able to afford to get one of them. With a small child in the house (no, not me!) we’ve got extra bills that we didn’t have a few years ago so purchases like these require more planning than they would otherwise. In order to fund my 10mm pieces of heaven I decided to sell of some models I no longer have use for as well as trying out a service I’ve seen advertised on TV numerous times.

If you’re anything like me (and I can assume you are as you’re gamers reading a gaming blog) you’ve got stacks of CDs, DVDs and games lying around the house. I’ve got boxes of CDs in the garage as well as DVDs and games that I’ve literally not played in years. My music is on iTunes and backed up too so I don’t really need the CDs any more and if I’ve not watched a film in years, especially on the now aging DVD format, what are the chances I’m going to want to in the hear future?

It was with these thoughts in mind that I decided to try Music Magpie. They offer money for your old CDs, DVDs and games and I had a load of them. I was hoping that this would be a quick and easy way to get rid of stuff that I didn’t want to provide funds for my UCM Mega Premium set. Therefore I thought I’d share my experience with you all.

To start off with you have to enter in the barcodes off all the stuff you want to get rid of. I found out early on that they don’t want PC games which was kind of a bust as I have far more of those than anything else. Still, I ruthlessly went through my XBOX pile and then through the DVDs and the box of CDs that I had in the garage. Overall there were over 80 items I’d typed in and very few were rejected. However, if you’re expecting big money out of this prepare for disappoint! CDs and DVDs averaged about 30p each, while the games did tend to provide more of a pay back with some of them fetching £6 or more. My 80 items came to just under £60, better than sitting around collecting dust at least!

So, I found out that with so many items that the shiny object loving birdie would come and collect things from my house for free, they’d even do it on a Saturday! I eagerly signed up and scheduled them to come grab my stuff, on June 23rd. Come that morning a woman, although the stubble was confusing as to identifying her gender, appeared and grabbed my large box of stuff. All you have to do is place the order with Music Magpie and they give you an inventory sheet to print and put with your order and an address label to attach to the box. I handed over the box, got my tracking number and that was it.

After a few days I checked to see what the status of my order was, to find out things still hadn’t been received at the warehouse, as things had been picked up by a courier and not just the Royal Mail I expected things to move a little faster than the languid pace of our normal postal service. Therefore I decided to give the tracking number a go so went to the couriers website, only to find out that the tracking number wasn’t enough! I needed to know the postcode of where the stuff was going, which Music Magpie don’t tell you. I tried the address off their site but nothing, so I couldn’t actually track my parcel. At the end of the week when things still hadn’t arrived according to their order status page I sent an email asking how long these things normally take. I’d got it in my head that they could turn things around inside of two weeks and that would allow me to place my pre-order with Hawk as I knew the cheque would be in the post.

The following week I got an email thanking me for my query, my box had actually then turned up and please allow 7 days for processing. I got an email two days later confirming that my order was received and they were now quality checking it. Seven days later the quality check had been done and the order was processing, they’d let me know when my cheque was being sent. Again, a week later I got an email saying my cheque was now in the post and to allow… you guessed it, seven days for it to arrive.

As of right now I still haven’t received the cheque. Today is now over one month since I sent my stuff over to them and I have not received payment. Considering I thought this would be able to be done inside of two weeks to allow me to get my pre-order in with Hawk I’m obviously not the happiest of customers. I’d have gotten more money putting everything on eBay with a free listing at 99p starting price. Even if stuff hadn’t had sold I’d have had time to re-post it and give things another go.

Hopefully I’ll get home from work today to find my cheque has arrived so I can get it paid into the bank, however, considering that every single stage of this process has taken at least a week I can’t exactly recommend this as a way of getting rid of your tat unless you are happy with this kind of turnaround. Considering my work environment and how fast I can get stuff turned around and what I know can be done in a warehousing operation these delays just seem to be something a modern company should have done away with. But things are the way they are.

As far as the ease of use goes though it is really easy to get rid of your stuff, I just wouldn’t recommend using them if you have any expectations of getting stuff inside of a one month time frame and that, for me, is the kicker. I don’t like waiting for stuff if it exceeds what I place as a reasonable expectation for completion. They give no indication on their site about how long it takes things to happen, I imagine that’s because if people knew they’d not use the service!